Hey thanks mate, there will be a lot more better in depth videos to come , I'm re fitting my shop , at the minute I have a 32A supply and when we are done il have bery nearly the full 100A 240v available in there... I've got a triple 50A variac stack just waiting for the supply 🙈😅😁👍👍👍
Thanks a lot for the video. Your design is rather unique i'd say as it has an isolated feedback coil and using the plate capacitance instead of a separate tank cap. Most designs I see just use a tap on the main coil to provide feedback and have another doorknob cap for the tank.
Thanks mate .. Yeah I did think of feeding G off the one coil through a cap and tuning with a variable cap but it was a quick demo that I was going to show then take apart so minimum effort and components was the order of the day 😂😂.. That said I intend on a proper go at this in the near future with a big tube so will be doing some testing etc, I will try document and show on here as I go...
@fuck google oh I meant to say hf vttc but yeah I want to make a hf sstc, I wouldn't be the first go onto a channel called teslista555 its a flame coming from a small coil with a relatively small flame
Very nicely done! I bet adding a bit of lumped C from a high-current vacuum cap would help bump up the RF current in the primary and output power. The very stable corkscrew discharges are also interesting. Wonder if these would occur if the system was powered off a filtered DC supply. Have also wondered it this phenomenon may be an interaction of the RF magnetic field from the winding and charged particles in the plasma, or if its simply a thermal-convection effect. Seems to show up on just about all types of coils with an AC or ramped envelope shape. Thanks again!
Thanks mate I will do more experiments next time I build a high frequency plasma flame, have you seen my other Vacuum tube coils? Theres a few on my channel, thanks for watching..... Steve
70mm mate, thanks for watching, I'm sick at the moment but have built a lot better plasma flame and will be making a video on it as soon as I'm well enough.. theres a video on my shorts.... Steve
@@T2D.SteveArcs Yup it is crazy. Just one question: Isnt there a risk of rf burns like from a magnetron when there is no flame? Becaus then it radiates a lot of rf power. Thank you and have a nice day. (Also thank you so mutch for the scematic.)
@@firefox1136 yes mate there is a risk of RF burns with any high frequency, high power, radiator. For example if you are wearing rubber soled shoes and touch something that is grounded, there is a good chance of RF burns. Steve
Hey mate, this is sick, i had a question about these base fed coils, would it be safe to touch the output like it is on a traditional style vttc or would you effectively be touching the live output of a microwave transformer, i made a gu81m vttc that is basefed but run im pretty sure just below 1MHz (cant remember exactly) its using two mots for 4kv centre tapped . So basically both anode and cathode are 2kv above ground potential. I get about half a meter spark output and the circuit uses no capacitors for tuning. I might put a video of it on my channel if you wanna check it out
In your schematic are the suppressor, screen and control grid in order going down with 1 2 and 3? Also are the capacitors between each leg if the Filament and ground parasitic capacitance?
Yes mate grid 1 and 2 are tied together and 3 (the suppressor) is tied to the cathode, as for the filament bang an external cap across the filament for rf bypassing
@@ethansprojects7399 thanks mate thanks for watching il hopefully be uploading again soon... v Building a big buck converter and full-bridge inverter to ramp the anode voltage so should be fun. Steve
Pretty neat! I wonder how much resonance is actually involved here. Is this just a high frequency transformer with a self-oscillating driver, or does it actually get a significant increase in voltage from resonance? I'm guessing the topload is not critical at all here. I'm also wondering how much power it was drawing.
Hi yes It is a rf auto-transformer , self oscillating driver and probs a few hundred watts rf and probs around 1200w input and it will be oscillating at the natural frequency determined by the LC of the tube and coil combo (and parasitics) I guess, this circuit was not tuned for max output impedance matched etc more just a quick lash up for demo, I do plan to look at this more in the future with a more powerful tube and more effort into getting maximum output😁.... Steve
Im not using soft start but it is basically applying the filament voltage gently ie wind up with a variac or start it through a resistor and then close the switch Steve
Hey buddy i need some help, i made a prototype of this version but cant get mine to oscillate, i used 5 Microwave diodes, a 570pf 15kv cap only one i had, my coil is wound on a 70mm waste pipe (maybe too big?) and i used 6 Microwave caps cause i dont have more. Filament and all works fine but no breakout nor any sogn of oscillation (lamp is off). If it helps i could upload a yt vid if you want to. Thank you for your time
I want to get all the plasma circuit tinkerers together in one room with all the radio antenna designers. Plasma as an antenna medium has been around since at least WW2. But it's fairly underutilized. NASA scientists have long studied plasma radio tech trying to solve the radio blackout problem of spacecraft reentering Earth's atmosphere as a hot plasma fireball that blocks radio communication. Innovations in efficient, low cost, high lifespan thermal plasma sources would be useful for a wide range of technology though, from satellite propulsion, to plasma processing landfill waste into useful materials. Someone in the comments mentioned how this flame resembles a lightsaber. Here's a radical idea for extending the plasma flame length: create a cone shaped, split ring resonator around the breakout needle, tuned to the coil frequency. The split rings will act as single loop coil inductor/capacitor around the output needle, causing them to resonate. The cone shaped profile of the split ring resonator allows something interesting to happen, it forms an antenna with the same beam profile as a cone shaped lens called an Axicon. If the ring resonator is designed correctly it will generate a "leaky" surface wave that propagates along the surface of the cone in the antenna near-field, until it "leaks" from the antenna into the far-field with that specific cone shaped beam profile. That beam profile will converge along the Z-axis of the cone into a focal line (as opposed to a focal point with a parabolic antenna). This is called a Bessel Beam, because the amplitude profile of the beam is an approximate solution to the Bessel function (aka the cylindrical harmonic which describes waves trapped in a cylinder). This Bessel Beam profile has been used in LASER particle acceleration experiments, because the angle and polarization of the light along the longitudinal axis of the beam ends up constructively interfering to produce the equivalent of an electric dipole in the direction of the beam. You can effectively create a beam of light that adds up all the electric field components by bending them forwards into the focal line, resulting in a net electric field that can accelerate ions or electrons to nearly light speed, the polarity depending on the phase profile of the beam. If you align the output of the directional Bessel antenna with the output of the plasma flame, you can heat and accelerate it after it has left the circuit and potentially ionize a path through the air a great distance from the breakout point.
Take a look at my other videos mate, I have a 1.6Mhz coil, it has a 1 foot secondary and can spit out 5 and a half feet swords 😅 thanks for your comment and thank you for watching.. All the best Steve Arcs
@@T2D.SteveArcs It's truly magnificent! You have my subscription friend. Please keep building bigger and of course be careful. Bigger is better as they say! I'm mostly interested in the applications of plasma circuits to ion propulsion, but a wild hot arc is pure joy. Generally ion thrusters operate at much higher voltages and low amperage for peak efficiency, but the use of thermal plasmas, and high current magneto-plasmoids for propulsion has a lot of different successful designs like Arc Jets and the NASA "plasmadynamic" thrusters. I'd love to see that 5 foot arc thrower of yours in a dense plasma focus configuration for example, like a coaxial railgun! Although you might start getting an unacceptable flux of X-rays at that point! :D Ethan Krauss here on UA-cam has a good example of the first ion thruster ever documented to be able to lift it's own power supply. Despite the design being almost 70 years old, the technology has been impractical without efficient, lightweight plasma circuits and power supplies, Ethan has patented a few miniaturized circuits for the purpose and he's making good progress. I think if ion thrusters are going to be efficient they need to have a hybrid approach where they use a high current arc to ionize and thermalize some air plasma, seeding the air with neutral plasma so that the high voltage, low current circuit can efficiently accelerate a larger population of ions. For the really long range plasmas though, we can also look to the US Army Electrolaser directed energy weapons program. They're aiming for laser induced plasma filamentation on the order of kilometers in length. Mostly they rely on a few techniques like shorter pulse duration, higher peak power and better self-focusing effects. But that's why I like the idea of combining the laser driven acceleration techniques with the HF, high current plasma circuits. A Bessel profile kills two birds with one stone, it solves part of the defocusing problem at long range, and it converts some of the energy in the LASER or RADAR wave to direct current in the plasma filament. Your circuits would be ideal for the thermalizing stage before acceleration, especially if you can employ a DC bias in the preferred direction. I believe that the DC bias should accelerate electrons and other negative ions in the forward direction ideally, rather than + ions, because electrons are lighter they will accelerate more, resulting in a non-equilibrium plasma where the electrons are much hotter than other ions, and so they form an effective virtual cathode ray in atmosphere, until the circuit is able to ground through the filament and discharges. I got the idea for a Bessel Beam plasma acceleration stage from a research paper titled "Circular Antenna Arrays For Microwave Bessel Beams". The Axicon beam profile can have an infinite focal length, so it's used in Astronomy for telescope lenses sometimes, but at short range it's used in industry for laser cutting perfect lines through materials, and for precisely guiding multi-meter long plasma discharges along the axis of the beam. However I've never seen those specific techniques combined in atmosphere in the same device! The Army Electrolaser is just a big capacitor dumped into the femtosecond laser filament. With circuits like yours that can get a plasma nice and hot before directing it, you could ditch the bulky pulse LASER for making the filament, and instead accelerate the plasma after it's already formed with much more compact phased array antenna. You could even use the plasma itself as a lasing medium with a beam that approximates a "wiggler" for free electron lasers. Perhaps this is not an efficient way to achieve the long range plasma beam I desire, but that's why I come to enjoy your work and be inspired to continue thinking about the problems.
Depends on power level. Continuously at low power, but not long at full power. But please bear in mind this was just a quick demo and certainly wasn't optimised, so you could definitely get better results with a tube of this size.
wow! bang up job bruv. this bad boi sounds like a frickin flying saucer lol would love to see how fast this thing could spin a corona motor. would you consider using a center tapped bifilar primary coil on a proper build? also this looks very similar to a recent paper i read about a microwave plasma jet thruster. have you seen this? aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0005814
This is one of the best channels about VTTC's/plasma flame genrators
Hey thanks mate, there will be a lot more better in depth videos to come , I'm re fitting my shop , at the minute I have a 32A supply and when we are done il have bery nearly the full 100A 240v available in there... I've got a triple 50A variac stack just waiting for the supply 🙈😅😁👍👍👍
@@T2D.SteveArcs Alright, I am looking forward for new experiments!
those vacuum tube oscillators are really crazy. its amazing that your are drawing out an arc to the air!
Ye the higher the frequency the lower the impedance to the air ...
I'm going to build a big one soon
@@T2D.SteveArcs ooh nice!
fantastic and clear explanation.
GOOD WORK
Cheers m8
The little ripple in the flame output is so cool
It is mate ... I'm building another plasma flame slowly, I uses a 5kw modern tube ...
Steve
Nice plasma flame, works well. Out of interest, have you tried moving the grid coil or adjusting the number of turns?
No mate. Just as it went together for demo. I am thinking of putting some time into a real effort with GU39B 😁
Thanks a lot for the video. Your design is rather unique i'd say as it has an isolated feedback coil and using the plate capacitance instead of a separate tank cap. Most designs I see just use a tap on the main coil to provide feedback and have another doorknob cap for the tank.
Thanks mate .. Yeah I did think of feeding G off the one coil through a cap and tuning with a variable cap but it was a quick demo that I was going to show then take apart so minimum effort and components was the order of the day 😂😂..
That said I intend on a proper go at this in the near future with a big tube so will be doing some testing etc, I will try document and show on here as I go...
I've been looking for a explanation on a hf sstc for a while now this was helpful
Great mate glad you liked it.. :)
@fuck google oh I meant to say hf vttc but yeah I want to make a hf sstc, I wouldn't be the first go onto a channel called teslista555 its a flame coming from a small coil with a relatively small flame
@fuck google 👍😂
@fuck google just look up hf sstc his hf sstc is the first result
I have to say that scares the poop out of me. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near it, but still fascinating to watch 😁👍
"Scares the poop out of me" ha ha .... thanks mate....
Very nicely done! I bet adding a bit of lumped C from a high-current vacuum cap would help bump up the RF current in the primary and output power. The very stable corkscrew discharges are also interesting. Wonder if these would occur if the system was powered off a filtered DC supply. Have also wondered it this phenomenon may be an interaction of the RF magnetic field from the winding and charged particles in the plasma, or if its simply a thermal-convection effect. Seems to show up on just about all types of coils with an AC or ramped envelope shape. Thanks again!
Thanks mate I will do more experiments next time I build a high frequency plasma flame, have you seen my other Vacuum tube coils? Theres a few on my channel, thanks for watching.....
Steve
Thanks for the video. What is the diameter of that plastic tube?
70mm mate, thanks for watching, I'm sick at the moment but have built a lot better plasma flame and will be making a video on it as soon as I'm well enough.. theres a video on my shorts....
Steve
Amazing, now I know what to do with my GU-81M.
Yes mate glad you like it😁 check out rest of my vids I have some awesome hv content
Steve
@@T2D.SteveArcs Yup it is crazy. Just one question: Isnt there a risk of rf burns like from a magnetron when there is no flame? Becaus then it radiates a lot of rf power. Thank you and have a nice day.
(Also thank you so mutch for the scematic.)
@@firefox1136 yes mate there is a risk of RF burns with any high frequency, high power, radiator. For example if you are wearing rubber soled shoes and touch something that is grounded, there is a good chance of RF burns.
Steve
@@T2D.SteveArcs Ok, thank you.
I like this topic ⚡⚡⚡❤️
Awesome. I'll be doing more vids about this in the future...think of a GU39b 10kw plasma flame 😁
Hey mate, this is sick, i had a question about these base fed coils, would it be safe to touch the output like it is on a traditional style vttc or would you effectively be touching the live output of a microwave transformer, i made a gu81m vttc that is basefed but run im pretty sure just below 1MHz (cant remember exactly) its using two mots for 4kv centre tapped . So basically both anode and cathode are 2kv above ground potential. I get about half a meter spark output and the circuit uses no capacitors for tuning. I might put a video of it on my channel if you wanna check it out
Hey mate no you cant touch the output from a coil like this as theres no isolation you would be touching the b+ hv supply directly
Steve
The sound given off sounds like 50Hz mains. Is it 18Mhz resonance modulated by mains waveform at 50Hz? (bit like interrupted DRSSTC?)
It uses a voltage doubler/level shifter so yes it's 50Hz 10ms ramped b plus 👍
In your schematic are the suppressor, screen and control grid in order going down with 1 2 and 3? Also are the capacitors between each leg if the Filament and ground parasitic capacitance?
Yes mate grid 1 and 2 are tied together and 3 (the suppressor) is tied to the cathode, as for the filament bang an external cap across the filament for rf bypassing
@@T2D.SteveArcsthank you, I appreciate your help and Love your work. I’m looking to build one of these and mess around with the values.
@@ethansprojects7399 thanks mate thanks for watching il hopefully be uploading again soon... v
Building a big buck converter and full-bridge inverter to ramp the anode voltage so should be fun.
Steve
Pretty neat! I wonder how much resonance is actually involved here. Is this just a high frequency transformer with a self-oscillating driver, or does it actually get a significant increase in voltage from resonance? I'm guessing the topload is not critical at all here.
I'm also wondering how much power it was drawing.
Hi yes It is a rf auto-transformer , self oscillating driver and probs a few hundred watts rf and probs around 1200w input and it will be oscillating at the natural frequency determined by the LC of the tube and coil combo (and parasitics) I guess, this circuit was not tuned for max output impedance matched etc more just a quick lash up for demo, I do plan to look at this more in the future with a more powerful tube and more effort into getting maximum output😁....
Steve
Very nice coil and flame! RF seems like witchcraft sometimes!
It's fun yeah 😁
The spiral would be caused simply by the MASSIVE electromagnetic field emanating from that 35 T coil
I love it!
Thanks mate. Glad you like it.
Steve
How does the soft start work and what does it do?
Im not using soft start but it is basically applying the filament voltage gently ie wind up with a variac or start it through a resistor and then close the switch
Steve
@@T2D.SteveArcs thank you!
@@BackMacSci welcome mate
Hey buddy i need some help, i made a prototype of this version but cant get mine to oscillate, i used 5 Microwave diodes, a 570pf 15kv cap only one i had, my coil is wound on a 70mm waste pipe (maybe too big?) and i used 6 Microwave caps cause i dont have more. Filament and all works fine but no breakout nor any sogn of oscillation (lamp is off). If it helps i could upload a yt vid if you want to. Thank you for your time
For testing purposes i did not put a rf bypass cap on either filament or the feedback resistor lamp
@@Juice.2707 upload a video with a schematic of what you have done
Not bad. But it is better to turn on the tube with a pentode, apply an offset to the second grid.
I want to get all the plasma circuit tinkerers together in one room with all the radio antenna designers. Plasma as an antenna medium has been around since at least WW2. But it's fairly underutilized. NASA scientists have long studied plasma radio tech trying to solve the radio blackout problem of spacecraft reentering Earth's atmosphere as a hot plasma fireball that blocks radio communication. Innovations in efficient, low cost, high lifespan thermal plasma sources would be useful for a wide range of technology though, from satellite propulsion, to plasma processing landfill waste into useful materials.
Someone in the comments mentioned how this flame resembles a lightsaber. Here's a radical idea for extending the plasma flame length: create a cone shaped, split ring resonator around the breakout needle, tuned to the coil frequency. The split rings will act as single loop coil inductor/capacitor around the output needle, causing them to resonate. The cone shaped profile of the split ring resonator allows something interesting to happen, it forms an antenna with the same beam profile as a cone shaped lens called an Axicon. If the ring resonator is designed correctly it will generate a "leaky" surface wave that propagates along the surface of the cone in the antenna near-field, until it "leaks" from the antenna into the far-field with that specific cone shaped beam profile. That beam profile will converge along the Z-axis of the cone into a focal line (as opposed to a focal point with a parabolic antenna). This is called a Bessel Beam, because the amplitude profile of the beam is an approximate solution to the Bessel function (aka the cylindrical harmonic which describes waves trapped in a cylinder). This Bessel Beam profile has been used in LASER particle acceleration experiments, because the angle and polarization of the light along the longitudinal axis of the beam ends up constructively interfering to produce the equivalent of an electric dipole in the direction of the beam. You can effectively create a beam of light that adds up all the electric field components by bending them forwards into the focal line, resulting in a net electric field that can accelerate ions or electrons to nearly light speed, the polarity depending on the phase profile of the beam. If you align the output of the directional Bessel antenna with the output of the plasma flame, you can heat and accelerate it after it has left the circuit and potentially ionize a path through the air a great distance from the breakout point.
Take a look at my other videos mate, I have a 1.6Mhz coil, it has a 1 foot secondary and can spit out 5 and a half feet swords 😅 thanks for your comment and thank you for watching..
All the best
Steve Arcs
@@T2D.SteveArcs It's truly magnificent! You have my subscription friend. Please keep building bigger and of course be careful. Bigger is better as they say!
I'm mostly interested in the applications of plasma circuits to ion propulsion, but a wild hot arc is pure joy.
Generally ion thrusters operate at much higher voltages and low amperage for peak efficiency, but the use of thermal plasmas, and high current magneto-plasmoids for propulsion has a lot of different successful designs like Arc Jets and the NASA "plasmadynamic" thrusters. I'd love to see that 5 foot arc thrower of yours in a dense plasma focus configuration for example, like a coaxial railgun! Although you might start getting an unacceptable flux of X-rays at that point! :D Ethan Krauss here on UA-cam has a good example of the first ion thruster ever documented to be able to lift it's own power supply. Despite the design being almost 70 years old, the technology has been impractical without efficient, lightweight plasma circuits and power supplies, Ethan has patented a few miniaturized circuits for the purpose and he's making good progress. I think if ion thrusters are going to be efficient they need to have a hybrid approach where they use a high current arc to ionize and thermalize some air plasma, seeding the air with neutral plasma so that the high voltage, low current circuit can efficiently accelerate a larger population of ions.
For the really long range plasmas though, we can also look to the US Army Electrolaser directed energy weapons program. They're aiming for laser induced plasma filamentation on the order of kilometers in length. Mostly they rely on a few techniques like shorter pulse duration, higher peak power and better self-focusing effects. But that's why I like the idea of combining the laser driven acceleration techniques with the HF, high current plasma circuits. A Bessel profile kills two birds with one stone, it solves part of the defocusing problem at long range, and it converts some of the energy in the LASER or RADAR wave to direct current in the plasma filament. Your circuits would be ideal for the thermalizing stage before acceleration, especially if you can employ a DC bias in the preferred direction. I believe that the DC bias should accelerate electrons and other negative ions in the forward direction ideally, rather than + ions, because electrons are lighter they will accelerate more, resulting in a non-equilibrium plasma where the electrons are much hotter than other ions, and so they form an effective virtual cathode ray in atmosphere, until the circuit is able to ground through the filament and discharges. I got the idea for a Bessel Beam plasma acceleration stage from a research paper titled "Circular Antenna Arrays For Microwave Bessel Beams". The Axicon beam profile can have an infinite focal length, so it's used in Astronomy for telescope lenses sometimes, but at short range it's used in industry for laser cutting perfect lines through materials, and for precisely guiding multi-meter long plasma discharges along the axis of the beam. However I've never seen those specific techniques combined in atmosphere in the same device! The Army Electrolaser is just a big capacitor dumped into the femtosecond laser filament. With circuits like yours that can get a plasma nice and hot before directing it, you could ditch the bulky pulse LASER for making the filament, and instead accelerate the plasma after it's already formed with much more compact phased array antenna. You could even use the plasma itself as a lasing medium with a beam that approximates a "wiggler" for free electron lasers. Perhaps this is not an efficient way to achieve the long range plasma beam I desire, but that's why I come to enjoy your work and be inspired to continue thinking about the problems.
Bright arc temp 12000K (50Hz)
how long can this candle be on ??
Depends on power level. Continuously at low power, but not long at full power. But please bear in mind this was just a quick demo and certainly wasn't optimised, so you could definitely get better results with a tube of this size.
Lightsabers are coming.
😂😂👍👍
wow! bang up job bruv. this bad boi sounds like a frickin flying saucer lol would love to see how fast this thing could spin a corona motor. would you consider using a center tapped bifilar primary coil on a proper build? also this looks very similar to a recent paper i read about a microwave plasma jet thruster. have you seen this?
aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0005814
Yeah it might be nice to use a centre tapped push pull, with a nice filtered supply.
Audio modulation me thinking! 😁 lol
Almost a light saber
🤣🤣👍👍